Today's computer systems are becoming increasingly sophisticated, permitting users to perform an ever increasing variety of computing tasks at faster and faster rates. Data storage and retrieval are two issues involved in nearly every computer operation.
Hard copy and soft copy are terms generally applied to distinguish between printed materials and electronic copies. To be non-volatile, the soft copy/electronic copy is traditionally stored in an appropriate data storage media.
Traditional forms of electronic data storage rely upon recording media set down with rigid devices, such as the magnetic media utilized in hard drives, floppy drives and magnetic tape. In a great many instances, a printed representation of the stored data is created, for example, in a textual document, graphic, chart, table or photograph.
Unlike a computer, a printed document does not require a continuous source of power to be enjoyed. Documents printed on paper are also portable and easily passed from one person to another.
With respect to a page of printed text, the amount of information available is generally limited by both the resolution of the character text printing device and the visual acuity of the party observing the printed document. In general, printed documents are rendered in easy to read type, such as Times New Roman or Arial, and in font size of between 10 and 12 to balance reading ease on the eye with density of material provided.
Optical text scanners are known and provide a means for converting paper-based objects, including text and graphics, into an electronic format that can be used by a computer system. Such optical scanning is not without difficulty. Errors are prone to exist in the character to electronic data conversion, resulting in corruptions within the converted data.
In addition, in most cases, the smaller the font or image being scanned and converted, the higher the likelihood of error in the digital conversion process. As such, for most optical character recognition systems, the amount of equivalent digitized data is substantially equivalent to the visual data presented. While perhaps appropriate for small portions of text and images, optical scanning is rather inefficient for the dissemination of applications or other data. For example, a word processor file providing hundreds if not thousands of pages of printed text may be stored on a single 3.5″ floppy disc.
The use of ink containing magnetic particles capable of supporting high density data will soon provide general users with the ability to print paper documents that provide both visual text and image data, and also provide digital information. Such digital information may, for example, be a soft copy version of the hard copy document, an application, or database information.
The ability to generate a storage medium when and where needed, and more cheaply than can be accomplished when using third party products such as floppy discs or optical discs, is likely to spur rapid growth in the creation of paper-based magnetic media storage devices. Although the lateral motion of a magnetic ink equipped inkjet printer provides one vehicle for permitting a user to read or write digital information to non-standard media, typical inkjet printers are not portable.
As portable computers—such as PDA's, laptops and other computing devices—become increasingly more commonplace, the need to read magnetically encoded data from non-standard media in the field (as in a place away from a desktop scanner or other non-portable device) will increase as well. Present optical scanning devices cannot meet this need as the elemental data to be scanned is physically different as is the scanning process.
For example, preset optical scanning devices are designed to read and recognize traditional human user information such as words into a form and are not capable of scanning or recognizing magnetically encoded digital information. In addition, traditional optical scanner are capable of scanning and processing only that which is visible. Where the data has been printed under an image or printed in invisible ink, the optical scanner is likely to be entirely ineffective.
Although magnetic read/write devices are commonly employed in data storage systems, there is currently a market void of portable magnetic scanners for use in scanning magnetic data on non-standard media.
Hence, there is a need for a portable magnetic stripline scanner device that overcomes one or more of the drawbacks identified above.